For their 8/22/18 hearing on ““Examining efforts to maintain and revitalize Native languages for future generations” (I sent it on official-looking letterhead)
——
August 21, 2018

TO: U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs
FROM: Margaret Speas, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, UMass Amherst
RE: Testimony on “Examining efforts to maintain and revitalize Native
languages for future generations”

When I began working with Navajo language scholars and activists in the mid 1980s, the extent of language attrition was just beginning to be measured, but it was clear that very few children were learning the Navajo language at home. This fact, which was part of the cumulative damage done to Navajo families by years of educational policy intended to wipe out their language, led me to be quite pessimistic about the likelihood of maintaining and revitalizing the language. However, due to the efforts of committed Navajo educators, families and scholars, impressive progress has been made, and in particular we can see what sorts of programs do the most to benefit Native American communities and America as a whole.

Research done since the passage of the Native American Languages Act of 1990 converges on two important conclusions (a few relevant references are given below):

1. Being bilingual gives a child a distinct cognitive advantage over monolingual
children, in nearly every area of cognition for which studies have been conducted.
While in Europe, India and China, over half of the population knows more than one language, 75% of Americans are monolingual. Bilingual children have been found to score better on tests of cognitive skills such as attention, task switching and complexity processing. Thus, whereas 30 years ago many may have thought that learning their heritage language could impede the educational progress of Native American children, it is now clear that learning both English and the heritage language improves the cognitive capacities that are crucial for education and success.

2. Native American children who are educated in Native Language immersion
schools perform better on standardized tests (including English language arts
tests) and have significantly higher graduation rates than Native American
children who attend English-only schools.
When the first Native language immersion programs were started, some parents worried that they would hold back the children’s skills in English and other subjects, while perhaps being no more effective than standard classroom methods of teaching the language. Twenty years in, it is now very clear that immersion programs are the best way to create young speakers of a language, and also that immersion in a heritage language actually helps with the learning of general language arts and therefore with English language arts. Children who are instilled with a pride in their heritage, with language at the root of that heritage, have a greater chance of success in life, education and employment.

Selected references:
Cognitive advantages of bilingualism:
http://www.res.org.uk/details/mediabrief/10503980/BILINGUAL-CHILDREN-DO-BETTER-IN-TESTS-US-evidence-that-speaking-two-languages-in.html

Marian, V. and A. Shook. 2012. ‘The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual’. Cerebrum. Sept/Oct. 2012.

Blom, E. T. Boerma, E. Bosma, L. Comips and E. Everaert. 2017. ‘Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts.’ Frontiers in Psychology. 8:552.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/11/29/497943749/6-potential-brain-benefits-of-bilingual-education

Pearson, B. Z. 2008. Raising a Bilingual Child. New York: Random House.

Bialystok, E. 2007. ‘Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism: How Linguistic Experience Leads to Cognitive Change.’ The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Vol. 10, No. 3.

Native Language immersion:
Klug, Kelsey. 2012. ‘Native American Language Act: Twenty years later, has it made a difference?’ Cultural Survival

https://collegefund.org/research-repository/native-american-language-immersion-innovative-native-education-children-families/

Indigenous-language Immersion Can Narrow Achievement Gap for Native American Students

https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/teaching-the-whole-child-language-immersion-and-student-achievement-GyPJtGyptEielvLHcbmPmQ/

During the week of June 19, the White House released its proposal for government reorganization, called “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century.”  You can read it here:  https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Government-Reform-and-Reorg-Plan.pdf

It is written in the sort of soporific prose that guarantees that almost no one will read it.  So I read it.  Below I will
a. give a translation into English of their list of initiatives.
b.repeat the list, re-ordered to distinguish between things that just reshuffle, things that
eliminate programs and things that create new programs
c. repeat the re-ordered list with some commentary

General Comments:
We all knew that with a Republican Congress and President, some sort of effort would be made to reduce the size of the Federal government. The document lists 32 different initiatives. Given what we know about past Republican efforts to reduce Big Gov’t and given the rhetoric of the current administration, I actually found the list to be surprisingly lacking in changes that were likely to result in much significant reduction. More alarming are the measures that do not reduce the size of government but only reduce the benefits that government is intended to provide. Most alarming are the measures that politicize areas of civil service that have been specifically designed to serve the people rather than the President.  I would like to call particular attention to Item 11.  This would, as far as I can tell, give the President direct authority to hire and fire civil servants.

Each measure that involves reorganization or funding has to be approved by Congress. The document is a wish list, and what has always happened before is that each item turns out to have lobbyists with Republican friends who make sure very little is cut. (This is already happening, for example, with respect to the proposal to privatize the TVA) At any rate, the main purpose of this document seems to be to have something to wave around as evidence that they have cut the government bigly. After having read it, I’m much more worried about cuts to Medicare and Social Security than I am about most of what they’re proposing here. The truly alarming provisions are the ones that consolidate power and politicize the cabinet agencies. Those are numbers 2, 11, 13 and 22. More on this in the commentary.

Please note that I am not doing this in any official capacity, and the language of this document is so opaque that I could be wrong about the way I’m interpreting some of them.  Certainly the administration will insist that it’s all just efficiency measures, nothing to see here.  It is urgent that Democrats in Congress become familiar with at least part of this document.

The summary was divided into three parts, “Mission Alignment Imperatives,” “Management Improvement and Efficiency Opportunities” and “Transformation Urgency.” I’ve tried to provide rough translations of these headings below.

A. My translation of their summary list:
I. MISSION ALIGNMENT IMPERATIVES (=Reshuffling programs in the hope that someone will forget to fund some of them.)

1. Merge the Dept. of Education with the Dept. of Labor
2. Change the name of HHS to “Department of Health and Public Welfare,” and move food stamps etc. from USDA into there.
3. Move the Civil Works part of the Army Corps of Engineers into the Depts. of Transportation and Interior.
4. Remove food safety from mission of FDA. Put all such functions under USDA.
5. Eliminate USDA’s rural housing programs. Put these functions into HUD.
6. Merge the Marine Fisheries Service with the Fish and Wildlife Service. That is, merge the agency that regulates commercial fishing with the agency that protects fisheries.
7. Remove authority for regulation of hazardous materials from DOI and USDA, and put all such responsibilities under EPA’s Superfund program.
8. Reduce foreign aid. (“optimize” State Dept and USAID programs)
9. Create new “Development Finance Institution” (i.e., privatize foreign aid)
10. “Transform USAID”
11. Move the “policy function” of the Office of personnel Management into the Executive Office of the President and “elevate its core strategic mission.”
12. Transfer responsibility for Vet’s cemeteries from DOD to Dept. of Vets. Affairs
13 Reorganize the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
14. Create Office of Energy Innovation, consolidating DOE’s applied energy programs
15. Privatize the TVA, USPS, Air Traffic Control, other parts of the DOT
16. Eliminate various kinds of support for helping middle and working class people afford housing. (“Transform….housing finance system.”)
17. Create a Bureau of Economic Growth in Dept. of Commerce (more privatizing)
18. Reduce US Public Health Service

II. MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT AND EFFICIENCY OPPORTUNITIES (=Privatizing)
19. Outsource some of the functions of NASA to “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.”
20. Put all graduate fellowships under NSF. I’m going to guess that the goal here is to eliminate fellowships for students in Humanities and Social Sciences.
21. Sell some Federal real estate.
22. Consolidate and streamline financial education and literacy programs (to be consolidated under Mnuchin’s Treasury Department)
23. Strengthen the Small Business Administration

24. Put security for all federal agencies under US Marshals’ Service with support from US Secret Service.
25. More USAID reduction. (Consolidate the small grants functions from the Inter-American Foundation and U.S. African Development Foundation into USAID)
26. Electronic recordkeeping. And, “end the National Archives and Records Administration’s acceptance of paper records by December 31, 2022.
III. TRANSFORMATION URGENCY – NEW CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS (=Something something cyber computer Nextgen something)
27. Create a “Government wide customer experience improvement capability” Because interacting with private companies like Comcast and GIC insurance is so very seamless.
28. “Next Gen” Financial Services Environment for federal student financial aid.
29 Solve the Federal cybersecurity workforce shortage.
30_Establish a “Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center” as a public-private partnership
31. Have DOD do all background checks for federal employees, rather than Office of Personnel Management.
32. More agency evaluations, more often.

B. The list, divided into reshuffle, eliminate and create:

Reshuffle:
1. Merge the Dept. of Education with the Dept. of Labor
2. Change the name of HHS to “Department of Health and Public Welfare,” and move food stamps etc. from USDA into there.
3. Move the Civil Works part of the Army Corps of Engineers into the Depts. of Transportation and Interior.
4. Remove food safety from mission of FDA. Put all such functions under USDA.
5. Eliminate USDA’s rural housing programs. Put these functions into HUD.
6. Merge the Marine Fisheries Service with the Fish and Wildlife Service. That is, merge the agency that regulates commercial fishing with the agency that protects fisheries.
7. Remove authority for regulation of hazardous materials from DOI and USDA, and put all such responsibilities under EPA’s Superfund program.
11. Move the “policy function” of the Office of personnel Management into the Executive Office of the President and “elevate its core strategic mission.”
12. Transfer responsibility for Vet’s cemeteries from DOD to Dept. of Vets. Affairs
13 Reorganize the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
22. Consolidate and streamline financial education and literacy programs (to be consolidated under Mnuchin’s Treasury Department)
24. Put security for all federal agencies under US Marshals’ Service with support from US Secret Service.
31. Have DOD do all background checks for federal employees, rather than Office of Personnel Management.

Eliminate: (note how little financial savings this represents!)
(Possibly the Dept. of Education, but reshuffling usually does not have the desired elimination result)
8. Reduce foreign aid. (“optimize” State Dept and USAID programs)
9. Create new “Development Finance Institution” (i.e., privatize foreign aid)
10. “Transform USAID”
15. Privatize the TVA, USPS, Air Traffic Control, other parts of the DOT
16. Eliminate various kinds of support for helping middle and working class people afford housing. (“Transform….housing finance system.”)
18. Reduce US Public Health Service
19. Outsource some of the functions of NASA to “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.”
20. Put all graduate fellowships under NSF. I’m going to guess that the goal here is to eliminate fellowships for students in Humanities and Social Sciences.
21. Sell some Federal real estate.
25. More USAID reduction. (Consolidate the small grants functions from the Inter-American Foundation and U.S. African Development Foundation into USAID)

Create new bureaucracy:
14. Create Office of Energy Innovation, consolidating DOE’s applied energy programs
17. Create a Bureau of Economic Growth in Dept. of Commerce (more privatizing)
23. Strengthen the Small Business Administration
26. Electronic recordkeeping. And, “end the National Archives and Records Administration’s acceptance of paper records by December 31, 2022. 27. Create a “Government wide customer experience improvement capability”
28. “Next Gen”Financial Services Environment for federal student financial aid.
29 Solve the Federal cybersecurity workforce shortage.
30_Establish a “Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center” as a public-private partnership
32. More agency evaluations, more often.

Commentary:

1. Merge the Dept. of Education with the Dept. of Labor
Well, at least this would put Betsy DeVos out of a job…. The new department would be called “Education and the Workforce.” This sort of reorganization is always touted as decreasing bureaucracy but almost never results in substantive changes to what a given department does. We already know they support charter schools and don’t care about adequate public education. We need to worry about the effect of this merger on programs in the Dept. of Labor: OSHA, Mine Safety and Health, Employees Compensation Appeals Board.

2. Change the name of HHS to “Department of Health and Public Welfare,” and move food stamps etc. from USDA into there.
Surely there’s no reason for the name change except to prime people to want to eliminate the department.

In the detailed discussion, they say that they will create a “Council on Public Assistance.” This is the program to watch. Its mandate seems to be to eliminate public assistance.

3. Move the Civil Works part of the Army Corps of Engineers into the Depts. of Transportation and Interior.

“The Civil Works programs include water resource development activities including flood risk management, navigation, recreation, and infrastructure and environmental stewardship. Our mission also includes emergency response”. (https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/)

4. Remove food safety from mission of FDA. Put all such functions under USDA.
They are taking social welfare programs out of USDA (food stamps) and putting the F part of FDA into USDA.

5. Eliminate USDA’s rural housing programs. Put these functions into HUD.
As I understand it, the rural housing program deals with housing in areas where no developers will invest, that is, sort of “last mile” housing. Rural Trump supporters will be affected by this.

6. Merge the Marine Fisheries Service with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

This merges the agency that regulates commercial fishing with the agency that protects fisheries. What could go wrong?

7. Remove authority for regulation of hazardous materials from DOI and USDA, and put all such responsibilities under EPA’s Superfund program.
One effect of this is to remove people who represent the interests of Native American tribes (i.e. people in DOI) from having any say over programs for hazardous materials.

8. Reduce foreign aid. (“optimize” State Dept and USAID programs)
9. Create new “Development Finance Institution” (i.e., privatize foreign aid)
10. “Transform USAID”

This item is likely to be one of the only ones where they can successfully remove funding since it doesn’t affect any Republican congressperson’s constituents.

11. Move the “policy function” of the Office of personnel Management into the Executive Office of the President and “elevate its core strategic mission.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The Office of Personnel Management is specifically designed to be a-political. To manage the federal workforce in a way that furthers the missions of the various departments and evaluates employees based on objective criteria, preventing hiring and firing for political purposes. From Wikipedia: “The OPM is partially responsible for maintaining the appearance of independence and neutrality in the Administrative Law System. While technically employees of the agencies they work for, Administrative Law Judges (or ALJs) are hired exclusively by the OPM, effectively removing any discretional employment procedures from the other agencies.” This change could give the President enormous direct power over hiring and firing of federal employees.

12. Transfer responsibility for Vet’s cemeteries from DOD to Dept. of Vets. Affairs
Fine.

13 Reorganize the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
These three agencies have entirely different purposes: Establishing demographics for the purposes of voting and resource allocation, analyzing the economy and tracking the workforce. The methods they need to use are also entirely different (house to house surveys vs. analyzing economic indicators vs. compiling data reported by employers.  Dems need to watch this carefully, as we can assume that the purpose is to undermine the census.

14. Create Office of Energy Innovation, consolidating DOE’s applied energy programs
A common tactic: remove funding, create a new “Office.”

15. Privatize the TVA, USPS, Air Traffic Control, other parts of the DOT
The proposal for the TVA has already been pretty much blocked by Republicans from the states that would be affected. Don’t know about the others.

16. Eliminate various kinds of support for helping middle and working class people afford housing. (“Transform….housing finance system.”)

17. Create a Bureau of Economic Growth in Dept. of Commerce (more privatizing)

18. Reduce US Public Health Service

I don’t know much about this, but people interested in Public Health should pay attention.

19. Outsource some of the functions of NASA to “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.”
I thought NASA already was a research and development center. I guess the purpose of this is to make sure no research center is too permanent.

20. Put all graduate fellowships under NSF. I’m going to guess that the goal here is to eliminate fellowships for students in Humanities and Social Sciences.

21. Sell some Federal real estate.

No details given about what or to whom.

22. Consolidate and streamline financial education and literacy programs (to be consolidated under Mnuchin’s Treasury Department)
The financial education and literacy program in the Treasure department was established under Bush, essentially to create propaganda about how the government needs to balance its budget. I wouldn’t miss this if it were eliminated.  But they won’t eliminate it.

23. Strengthen the Small Business Administration

24. Put security for all federal agencies under US Marshals’ Service with support from US Secret Service.

25. More USAID reduction. (Consolidate the small grants functions from the Inter-American Foundation and U.S. African Development Foundation into USAID)
26. Electronic recordkeeping. And, “end the National Archives and Records Administration’s acceptance of paper records by December 31, 2022.

Clearly some work needs to be done on the government’s electronic records. I hope Dems will pay attention to finding out exactly what they mean by ending paper records. All paper records, of everything?

27. Create a “Government wide customer experience improvement capability”
Being recently retired, I’ve had lots of recent opportunities to interact with customer service at both Medicare and my private insurance company. Medicare customer service was truly excellent. The private insurance company was an utter nightmare. Social Security also has excellent customer service. If anybody thinks life will be better if customer service for the government becomes more like that of Comcast, Bank of America, Microsoft, Verizon or Aetna, they’ve obviously never actually interacted with any of these.

28. “Next Gen” Financial Services Environment for federal student financial aid.
OK, whatever this means. I’m for getting someone who knows about technology to revamp gov’t computer systems. Not clear where they’ll find people to do this. See #29.

29 Solve the Federal cybersecurity workforce shortage.
Can’t wait to see how they do this while also giving so much in tax breaks to billionaires that they can’t afford to pay anyone even half what they can get at Facebook. But at least I do agree that this is a big problem that needs attention.

30_Establish a “Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center” as a public-private partnership
Um, ok. They’ve got the acronym, so that was the hard part, right?

31. Have DOD do all background checks for federal employees, rather than Office of Personnel Management.
Because Muslims might be considering taking a job cleaning bathrooms at the Commerce Department, and this’ll nip that in the bud.

32. More agency evaluations, more often.

I’m getting tired of claims that marches of Neo Nazis have to do with restrictions on their freedom of speech. They say that people who turn out to protest them are abridging their freedom of speech. They think that swift negative reactions to their manifestos are attacks on free speech. They believe others are restricting their freedom of speech by making them feel bad when they say things that other people find offensive. They claim that the absence of University professors who advocate their views shows that Universities are stifling free speech.

The first amendment of the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Freedom of speech means that we have a right to state our beliefs without government interference. Freedom of speech does NOT mean:

-a right to be listened to
-a right to be invited to a University campus to present your ideas
-a right to feel good about yourself if you say things that those around you find odious
-a right to say offensive things without anyone telling you it’s offensive.
-a right to have no one get angry about what you say
-a right to not be told you’re wrong.
-a right to silence opposition to what you say
-a right to beat up people who disagree with you
-a right to keep your job if you are advocating against your company’s policies
-a right to keep your friends if you promote policies that harm them

Nobody on the left is advocating that Congress make it illegal for you to say what you think. Keep saying it all you want. Just remember that the first amendment gives you no right to a compliant audience.

People have been sending me articles about reaching out to Trump supporters. “Five Things People don’t Get about the American Working Class”
( http://www.afr.com/news/politics/election/5-key-things-people-dont-get-about-the-american-working-class-20161117-gsra1s)is one of those. Here is my reply to that article. I will read articles about reaching out to Trumpfsupporters when I see a Trump supporter circulating something like the article below.

Five Things People Don’t Get About the Professional Class

In this difficult and divisive time, we need to search our souls and ask ourselves “Why did Hillary Clinton receive almost two million more votes than our candidate did?” Clearly we have abandoned the professional class, and have been oblivious to their anger and alienation, as Republicans have gained control of Congress despite the total votes for members of Congress being a majority for Democrats. I believe that our unwillingness to listen to the professional class and understand their values is an important cause of that anger. If we ever hope to actually win a majority of the popular vote, we must reach out and find ways of bridging the gap between us and the professional class.

One little-known element of that gap is that those in the professional class find many of the rich immoral and actually admire and want to help the working class! Many in the professional class grew up in working class homes, and struggle to stay close to their relatives despite having been laughed at for listening to NPR and called pretentious snobs because they read books for fun. Some even continue trying to reach out after being disowned for being homosexual, punched or verbally abused for defending Black Lives Matter activists or scorned as an elitist know it all for believing that the New York Times is more balanced than Fox News! Even now after we Trump supporters told them to basically go fuck themselves, they persist in exhorting each other to reach out to us.

That said, many in the professional class resent the working class, yet admire and feel sympathy for the poor! Why the difference? For one thing, few in the professional class came from truly poor families, and so their experience with being disowned, spat on, laughed at, beat up,  insulted for being “dorky” or “arrogant” has come from working class relatives. It’s generally working class people who they have heard cat-calling professional women, addressing people of color with slurs or mocking homosexuals. “When Trump said he could ‘grab them by the pussy’, that just brought back how I used to have to walk 3 extra blocks to work every day just to avoid the construction site,” Says Polly Prof. of Boulder CO. “The way Trump mocked that disabled person, it just made me cry because it was so much like how my uncle acted after I brought my disabled friend to dinner.” Worse, Trump’s mere presence rubs it in that even men from her class can treat professional women men with disrespect. Look at how he scorns Hillary and looms over her as she tries to present policy positions, and dismisses her supporters out of hand as “elitist”, “fat pigs” and “losers.”
Hillary’s wonky policy statements tap into another professional class value: informed discussion. “Basing decisions on examining facts is a professional-class norm,” notes Moxie Lawful. As one professional woman told her, “If you have a problem with me, come and tell me why. If you have a decision that you need me to make, be sure I have all of the relevant information! I don’t like people who make gut-based decisions based on false beliefs!” Being informed is seen as requiring morally-responsible effort, not “thinking it’s funny to be a dumbass,” a doctor told Lawful. Of course Clinton appeals! Trump’s snarky brags that the “knows more than the generals” and doesn’t need to know anything about foreign countries? Seems to them like further proof he’s an ignorant bigot.

Human mutual respect is a big deal for professional class men and women, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Clinton promises a world free of bigotry and progress toward an era when all people have a place at the table. It’s comfort food for people with advanced degrees whose mothers could have been doctors or lawyers if they had been born 30 years later. Today they feel like progress is stalled – or they did, until they met Hillary.

Human rights are a big deal for most college graduates. Many still measure human rights in global terms. So is willingness to combat racism. These things are more important to them than a paycheck. In the 1960s, a White college professor could afford a nice house on the leafy main street, with only one breadwinner in the family. Now families with both parents working struggle to save enough to send their children to college. But do they look for scapegoats, or blame their stagnant standard of living on globalization? No, they celebrate the fact that poverty worldwide has decreased dramatically over the past 40 years, and they pursue their work for reasons that they find more fulfilling than money. For most professionals, all they’re asking for is basic human open-mindedness and respect for education. Hillary promises to deliver it.

The Republicans’ solution? Last week Fox news ran a story advising professional men and women to shut up and stop caring about whether people are insulted if you use racial slurs or express disgust for someone’s religion or love life. Talk about insensitivity! Working class men, you will notice, are not rushing to shut up and accept being insulted. To recommend that for professionals just fuels their anger.

Isn’t what happened to Trump with the popular vote unfair? Not really. It IS unfair that he wasn’t a plausible candidate until he had told so many lies that he was suddenly plausible because people couldn’t tell what the truth was any more. It may be unfair that Trump is called a “misogynist” when he clearly loves his daughter. It’s unfair that Trump only did so well in the primaries because he appealed to people’s deepest fears and prejudices. It’s unfair that Sanders fed into Trump’s narrative about Hillary being dishonest even though she has been fact-checked as one of the most honest politicians in existence. The election shows that propaganda retains a deeper hold than most imagined. But professionals don’t stand together: only 47% of Americans voted, with many Sanders supporters staying home or voting for third party candidates. If they had all voted for Hillary, she would have won the electoral vote.

Propaganda trumps facts, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Republicans if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points.
1. Understand that professional class means middle class, not rich.
The terminology here can be confusing. When republicans talk about elites, typically they mean the rich. But the rich, in the top 1% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose income is between $40,000 and $190,000 per year. “The thing that really gets me is that Republicans try to offer policies (tax cuts! privatization of health care!) that they SAY will help the middle class,” a friend just wrote me. No one below the top 1% benefits from these policies. Same with tax shelters for businesses. Most professionals are not interested in working on wall street with no goal other than to get rich, whether there are tax cuts for the rich or not. What they want is what my father-in-law had: meaningful, interesting jobs that help others, gain them the respect of others and make the world a better place. Clinton promises that, and she was much more likely to deliver on her promises than Trump.
2. Understand professional-class resentment of the rich
Remember when President Bush sold his tax cuts by pointing out that they cut the “death tax”? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the rich, said the professional class, and in nearly all cases that has proven true: The very rich got tax cuts while most Americans got little or nothing.
Conservatives have lavished attention on the rich for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to tax policies targeting the rich. Trickle-down programs that help the rich but exclude the middle may keep the stock market rising, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 100% of rich families receive benefits in the form of tax deductions, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own, but she did so willingly because she felt it was important to do work that makes her community better. Then, her program was cut because the Bush-caused financial collapse meant that big banks had to be bailed out at the expense of funding for children’s education. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms voted for Republicans. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying a copy of the National Enquirer that claimed Obama is a Muslim. My sister-in-law was livid.

Tracy Kidder’s much heralded book Mountains Beyond Mountains captures this resentment. While Republicans continue to cut aid of all sorts, Dr. Paul Farmer goes to Haiti, giving up a lucrative practice to work for those in need. While wall street bankers AND construction workers work solely for a paycheck, people like Dr. Farmer who want to make a difference struggle against long odds. To accomplish that, he lives a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Kidder’s book passes harsh judgment on high-living Americans who ignore problems in the Third World while buying things for themselves. This attitude is not uncommon among hard-working professionals who have tried to educate others and make the world a better place through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the rich.
Other books that get at this are The Grapes of Wrath and Capital in the 21St. Century.
3. Understand how class divisions have translated into geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Republicans is the recommendation that the uneducated move to a city or college town. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are uneducated, unemployed or on disability, fuelling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic. Cities and college towns have more jobs than rural areas and offer many free educational opportunities. When did you hear any American politician talk about that?  Never. People in the Professional class are much more willing to move where the jobs are, but do politicians suggest that people in coal country stop sitting around complaining that miners’ jobs are gone and move to places where they can get training and a good job?  No.
4. If you want to connect with professional-class voters, place education at the centre.
“The professional class is just so dorky. Don’t they realize that people aren’t convinced by facts, and that hearing policy statements is boring?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the professional class agrees with, which is why they supported Sanders in large numbers this year. But to them, Republicans are worse, since they ignore facts and thrive on ignorance.
Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the people who lost jobs, which, includes both working class people and professional workers who lost work as new universities opened up in India and China to train workers for high-tech jobs. These are precisely the foreign countries that Republicans spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to cause people to fear. Excuse me. Who’s dorky?
One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs. Another is that Americans cannot continue to have a standard of living that is exponentially higher than in the rest of world without returning vast numbers of people around the world into abject poverty.
At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Democrats have one: restrain the excesses that have led to the rich getting so much richer. Republicans? They remain obsessed with immigrants and other scapegoats. I fully understand why Islamic Fundamentalism is important, but I also understand why conservatives’ obsession with rounding up immigrants and harassing people of color infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are the actual reality of the economic situation.
Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Republicans have been consistently blocking efforts to fund such programs for 40 years. Clinton advocated for such programs, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not abandon social issues and look for scapegoats in order to work toward her goals.
5. Avoid the temptation to write off professional resentment as elitism.
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Drumpf supporters (and Drumpf himself), bleeds into open racism. This plus the indifference of many Drumpf supporters to facts has led many professionals to become frustrated that their efforts to educate people are met with scorn and a preference for emotional slogans and scapegoating over knowledge. But to write off professionals’ anger as nothing more than elitism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fuelling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For working class people to write off anyone who objects to the too-frequent killings of black civilians by police as elitist and anti-police is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are rarely said in front of professional class people, class-based insults still are.

I do not defend protesters who condemn all police because of some who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of “black lives matter” and other human rights activists underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. They need to be trained to understand how often implicit bias can affect how they act under duress. I don’t have to worry about my son being shot by police. If I did, or knew someone who did, I might protest too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends in the red middle. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap and try to understand those who voted against Trump, when he proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour I gave a talk about all of this at the Youngstown Kiwanis Club. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Republican operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Republicans need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.

I read two interesting things in Salon today (my echo-chamber of choice). The first (http://www.salon.com/2016/02/15/sanders_might_be_our_best_candidate_but_dont_buy_into_his_masterful_pandering_about_starting_a_political_revolution/) describes Sanders’ talk about revolution as pandering, explaining that all politicians make promises they know they can’t keep and that Sanders is clearly playing the pollitical game.  The second, (http://www.salon.com/2016/02/15/bernies_man_behind_the_scenes_tad_devine_is_the_karl_rove_to_sanders_2016_populist_uprising/) is about Sanders’ campaign advisor, Ted Devine, who is a hardcore inside-the-beltway politico.

Did these articles make me think “Oh yeah, Bernie’s just like all the rest so revolution smevolution”?  No.  It made me think maybe he can win.  It made me think about the incremental changes that have come from the 60s movement.  It made me think, well, what made John Lewis and Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone and Hillary Clinton and Madeline Allbright get involved so they could make changes?  What made the people get involved who made the incremental changes that resulted in there now being perhaps critical mass of people of color in positions of power so that the problems of Ferguson and mass incarceration can’t be ignored?  Maybe some good old effective pandering?

I’m still completely convinced that changing hearts and minds of the opposition doesn’t happen.  Bigotry and fear dig in when you try to change them.  But there are more Democrats in this country than Republicans, so maybe mobilizing them to believe in big changes even though we know perfectly well that only incremental changes ever get made is the only way to get the next generation fired up to get in there and be the incremental changers.

I also still think Hillary would be a better president than Bernie because she has what it takes to work in the current hostile environment.  But if Bernie supporters get involved, maybe by 2020 or 2022 the tide in Congress and state governments will have turned.

Preface: This is not meant to be an anti-Sanders statement. I understand perfectly why people are so excited about Sanders. This is meant to explain why Gloria Steinem said what she said the other day about young women following Sanders because that’s where the boys are.

Here follows the explanation:
I often see articles declaring that Hillary Clinton represents the same old thing and Bernie Sanders represents new ideas. Every woman who went to any leftist activity in the 60s knows that this is not true. Bernie Sanders represents positions he has stuck by for 40 years, which great, he’s principled. But it also means that Bernie Sanders behaves just like the self-styled radical boys of 40 years ago who held the megaphone at rallies and confidently proclaimed their understanding of the state of the world. I always wondered how some 20 year old from the suburbs could know so much about the nature of Imperialism, the plight of farm workers, the politics of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the way international banking works, the lives of the Working Class, the ways to overcome neocolonialism, the history of rural poverty in China and how Maoism overcame it, the best ways to teach relevant college courses and the cure for racism. I wondered how they could be so sure they were right when they had so little experience and explained so little about how we would actually get the Workers to stop screaming about hippies and start organizing for a revolution. Women were not generally welcome to seize the megaphone, and it seemed clear that in order to be heard at all they had to look like Gloria Steinem, not be shrill, not seem indecisive while also not seeming like a know-it-all, and then if they did feel they had gotten into a position of power it would turn out that it was just because some powerful man wanted to sleep with them.

Hillary behaves the way a woman had to behave to get ahead. In the 70s, putting her career ahead of her husband’s was out of the question. She kept her own last name until her husband ran for office, and if she had not changed it in the 80s, he would not have been elected. If she had been less hawkish in the 90s, her career would have been over because she would have been “weak.” If she EVER talked the way Sanders does, her career would be over because she would be “shrill.” If she advocated radical programs with no plan to implement them except “we’ll have a revolution”, her career would be over because she would be “ditzy” or “crazy.” If she fought back against the ridiculous claim that she “has no accomplishments” and “the Clinton years in the 90s were a disaster for African Americans” by continuously spelling out her many accomplishments, her career would be over because she would be “arrogant” and “out of touch.”

So, to some women of a Certain Age, Sanders comes across not as a breath of fresh air but as an exact replica of the way we remember the leading leftist men of the 1960s. Steinem knew then that following those men who seemed so sure of what they were saying was a way to power, and indeed she was given a voice because she was attractive to men. She knows that. So I think what her subconscious was saying was “It’s extremely discouraging that after all these years, the leftist boy with the megaphone is the one with real power.”

Because people like Steinem took the best advantage they could of the voice they were given for whatever reason they were given it, and because people like Hillary walked the only path possible for them and pushed past so many barriers, it is no longer impossible for a woman to become president without being propelled by a man. Women can believe they deserve equal power and respect regardless of whether they act like others think they “should” act, and the range of ways that a woman can act without being shut down has vastly increased. So it’s actually extremely encouraging that young women don’t feel any need to support Hillary just because she’s a woman. It’s just a wee bit heartbreaking to watch the boy with the megaphone reaping the benefits of 40 years of older women’s hard work

With age, comes wisdom about things no one wants to know about. I’ve started making a list of the things I have learned in my life that are now irrelevant:

-how barrier inheritance worked in Chomsky’s 1985 theory of Barriers.
-where linguists put complementizers and wh-phrases before there was CP
-how to operate a mimeograph machine
-how to load paper into one of those printers with the little sprockets that feed the paper with holes on the sides
-all the words to the jingle used by Baltimore Federal Savings and Loan in 1965.
-how to make cheese fondue
-how to use Word Perfect for MS DOS
-how to create a website in Dreamweaver in 1996
-what the best cheap restaurants were in Central Square in 1983.
-how to plan a trip by researching hotels in guidebooks and writing to them for reservations.
-how to use a pay phone in Paris in 1981 to make an international call
-why Lasnik and Saito proposed “gamma marking” in their theory of long distance movement
-how to iron
-how to straighten your hair with an iron
-how to keep polyester clothes from melting if you need to iron them
-what the problem was with Kari’s rule of “ni-absorption” for Navajo
-how feature percolation worked in late 1980s HPSG
-how to formalize passives in Relational Grammar
-what the major insight of Connectedness theory was, and how Barriers theory differs from it
-which members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Joni Mitchell slept with
-all the words to probably 30 Joni Mitchell songs
-the Bryn Mawr School prayer
-the motivations for and details of Ken Hale’s theory of variation in the Projection Principle.
-what the Projection Principle was, and why Chomsky’s grammar doesn’t include it anymore.
-what Williams said about Small Clauses, and how it isn’t really about what we now generally think of as Small Clauses (if we ever use that term)
-who dressed up as Koko the gorilla for Chomsky’s 50th birthday party
-how the feature [-coronal] differs from the feature [grave].
-what Elizabeth Sagey’s dissertation was about
-what the Symbionese Liberation Army was, what the name was of its leader was, and where that name came from.
-how many chemical elements there were in 1967.
-how the tune goes that was used to communicate with aliens in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind
-how to formalize a transformation in the Standard Theory
-who founded the National Lampoon
-what Jackie Kennedy was wearing when JFK was shot
-how to make pull taffy
-how to use PSSSST hair powder/spray
-which toothpaste had Bucky Beaver as a mascot
-what C. Wright Mills said about the Power Elite in his 1956 book
-what young women in 1972 thought was going to happen as a result of feminism
-who the first female news (co)anchor was (and that it was in 1974)
-who H.R. “Bob” Haldeman was
-why Oliver North ought to be in jail rather than on TV as an expert military commentator
-the name of Jimmy Carter’s daughter
-how to spread peanut butter on Wonder Bread without making holes in it
-which currently common foods were thought of as only for “health nuts” when I was young.
-what Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers is about
-the significance to politics of the phrase “there you go again.”
-who Dan Quayle is
-what novel begins with the words “A screaming comes across the sky”